Читать книгу Animal Characters - Bruce Thomas Boehrer - Страница 7
ОглавлениеLodovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516) begins with an encounter arranged by a horse. Having lost her protector to an onslaught of heathen warriors, the princess Angelica escapes the fray on her palfrey and falls into the company of the horseless Sacripante, King of Circassia, who has loved her long and unrequitedly. As the two make their way together, they are startled by an uproar in the nearby undergrowth, from which emerges the riderless Baiardo, steed of another suitor to Angelica, Rinaldo. Sacripante attempts to mount Baiardo, but the stallion submits only at the behest of Angelica, whom he greets, literally, “with human gesture” [“con…gesto umano” (1.75.2)]. Then, as the couple fare forward once more, Rinaldo appears, on foot, challenging Sacripante to combat for the theft of his horse and his lady.
Sacripante, astride Baiardo, turns to attack the disadvantaged Rinaldo, but the horse will have none of it:
The beast did know thus much by nature's force,
To hurt his master were a service bad.
The pagan could not nor with spur nor hand
Make him unto his mind to go or stand.
[(I)l destrier per instinto naturale
non volea fare al suo signore oltraggio:
né con man né con spron potea il Circasso
farlo a volontà sua muover mai passo.]
(2.6.4–8)
Thus obliged to dismount and fight hand to hand, Sacripante falls to blows with Rinaldo, and Angelica once more uses the confusion of battle as a cover for escape. As the episode concludes, Rinaldo regains his horse and sets off in pursuit of his beloved, and Ariosto's narrator pauses to explain Baiardo's bizarre behavior:
The horse (that had of humane wit some tast)
Ran not away for anie jadish knacke.
His going only was to this intent
To guide his maister where the Ladie went.
….….….….….….….…..
He followed her through valley, hill, and plaine,
Through woods and thickets for his maisters sake
Whom he permitted not to touch the raine
For feare lest he some other way should take.
[Fece il destrier, ch’avea intelletto umano,
non per vizio seguirsi tante miglia,
ma per guidar dove la donna giva,
il suo signor, da chi bramar l’udiva.
…. …. …. …. …. …. …. …. .
Bramoso di ritrarlo ove fosse ela,
per la gran selva inanzi se gli messe;
né lo vlea lasciar montare in sella,
perché ad altro camin non lo volgesse.]
2.20.1–8, 22.1–4)
Only when the horse is satisfied that Rinaldo will indeed follow Angelica does he permit his master to mount him once again.
This sequence of events, comprising canto 1 and the first part of canto 2 of Ariosto's poem, can occur only because Baiardo, the horse, makes a series of calculated decisions: to abandon Rinaldo and pursue Angelica; by doing so to lead Rinaldo to Angelica; to refuse to engage in unequal combat against his master; and to reunite with his master when circumstances appear to warrant it. In the process, Baiardo reveals himself to possess what Ariosto calls “intelletto umano” (2.20.5). He distinguishes between persons, responds to certain ones with loyalty and intimacy, and confronts others with willful resistance. He occasionally differs in opinion even with his intimates, and he is prepared to translate this difference into uncooperative behavior. He is self-aware, acts on personal motives, reaches considered judgments concerning the motives and behavior of others, and engages in hypothetical reasoning. By all of these measures, Baiardo is a fully drawn literary character: an agent, a subject, a person.
Baiardo is not unique, either within Ariosto or to Ariosto. Other Ariostan horses—Orlando's Brigliadoro, for instance, and Astolfo's Rabicano—are endowed with their own literary personalities. And more generally, the Furioso unfolds in a quasi-Ovidian universe characterized by highly unstable species boundaries, in which nonhuman animals can exhibit the indicia of human character while human beings, on the other hand, can devolve into nonhuman forms. Thus, for instance, just four cantos after the opening encounter between Angelica, Sacripante, Rinaldo, and Baiardo, another of Ariosto's heroes tethers his mount to a myrtle tree, only to hear the tree cry out in pain. As the hero, Ruggiero, questions the tree, it identifies itself as a former knight named Astolfo, imprisoned in arboreal form by the Circe-like enchantress Alcina, who has likewise transformed other knights-errant into streams and animals (“altri in liquido fonte, alcuni in fiera” [6.51.7]). However, such scenarios prove so endemic to the genre of courtly romance as to exceed the purview of any single author.
Indeed, it is the generic legacy, as this meets its English demise in the works of Shakespeare and Milton, with which the present chapter concerns itself. My interest here engages the fate of animal characters such as Baiardo—the extraordinary yet also typical fauna of the romance tradition—at the hands of England's two greatest Renaissance poets. Equally responsive to this tradition, both Shakespeare and Milton repudiate it in different ways, the former with a certain Tory wistfulness, the latter with a Whiggish contempt. In doing so, both these authors arguably respond and contribute to the intellectual tensions that enable the Cartesian moment. In the process, they also lay the groundwork for future literary conventions that will strive for new rigor in distinguishing between human and nonhuman life by depriving the latter of any claim to sentience or conscious agency.
Horse-Sense and Chivalry
I begin with Ariosto's Baiardo for two reasons: because the Orlando furioso, more than any other literary work, may claim to stand as the apotheosis of the courtly romance tradition; and because within the Furioso, Baiardo offers a particularly rich example of that tradition's approach to the character potential of nonhuman animals. Like much else in Ariosto's poem, Rinaldo's horse carries with him the weight of history—a history that in his case encompasses some three and a half centuries of literary portrayal. In effect, he embodies a specific legacy of equine representation, one that derives from a chivalric culture centered on the relationship between warriors and horses and which, as a result, tends to assign enhanced subjectivity to certain privileged exemplars of both groups. Indeed, one might object that the very qualities which render Baiardo a fitting subject of chivalric song—his preternatural intelligence, loyalty, strength, and speed—prevent him from serving as an illustration of medieval attitudes toward horses or nonhuman animals in general. That, however, in a sense is the point. Baiardo is a literary product of a highly and self-consciously stratified social order. He appears in courtly romance for the same reason as do the genre's human protagonists: because he is distinctive, superior, exceptional—in a word, heroic. In this respect he embodies the ideals of the courtly elite that romance as a genre is designed to celebrate. To this extent one could argue that in Orlando furioso—and more broadly within the romance tradition it epitomizes—rank trumps species as a marker of difference between persons.
On this view, Baiardo would, in fact, appear to be more suitable as a companion and peer for Rinaldo than would the vast mass of humanity. Certainly the romance tradition insists on a special linkage. Baiardo first appears, as Bayard, in the early thirteenth-century Quatre fils Aymon, traditionally attributed to Renaud de Montaubon, and here the horse already possesses the qualities that distinguish him as a literary figure. On one occasion, for instance, Renaud and Bayard compete in a grand horse race whose prize includes the crown of Charlemagne. Before the race commences, both horse and rider have been subjected to insults by other members of the field, so pride is particularly at stake. When the starting trumpets sound, Bayard and his master quickly find themselves at the rear of the field, and Renaud takes time to give his horse a pep talk:
[W]han Reynawde saw that it was tyme for to renne after the other: he spurred his horse, & said to bayarde, we been ferre behynde ye myght wel abide. For if ye be not soone afore: ye shall be blamed, whan Bayarde heard his master speake thus: he understoode him as well as thoughe he had been a man. Than he grylled his nosethrels and bare his head up and made a long necke, and tooke his course so fast that it semed the erthe should haue sonken under hym, and within a whyle he was passed all the other horses a ferre waye. (Right plesaunt…historie, fol. 49v)
[“Baiart, ce dist Renaus, trop uos alons tarjant.
Se cil i vont sans nos, blasme i averons grant;
Reprovés vos sera à trestot vo vivant.”
Baiart oï Renaut, si va le cief dreçant;
Ensement l’enten li com mere son enfant.
Il fronce des narines, le cief vait escoant.
Renaus lache les regnes, Baiart s’en va bruiant,
Tot à col estendu, le terre (porprennant);
En trois arpens de terre en a trespassé tant,
Que trestot le plus cointe se tient por (recreant).]
(4927–36)
Here the bond between horse and knight manifests itself in a common language and a harmony of interest, with the former acting as an expression of the latter. The La Vallière Manuscript of the Quatre fils has Bayard understand Renaud “com mere son enfant,” that is, as a mother does her child; William Caxton's 1489 English translation, perhaps drawn from a different copy text, renders the same line as “he understood him as well as thoughe he had been a man.” Like Renaud, Bayard is concerned with honor, his own and his master's, and the two figures base their claim to heroism on the determination to maintain their good name through exploits of the sort described in this episode. In the process, however, the Quatre fils Aymon also celebrates resistance to authority, situating itself within the tradition of the Old French “epics of revolt” (Calin 113), which take feudal injustice and rightful disobedience as their subject matter. From this standpoint the poem retails the exploits of Renaud in resisting the persecution of Charlemagne, whose nephew Renaud has slain after quarreling over a game of chess. In the action that follows, Bayard and Renaud emerge as equally resourceful opponents of Charlemagne, and when the two human antagonists are finally reconciled, it is at the expense of the horse, who effectively takes Renaud's place as the object of Charlemagne's punishment:
[Charlemagne] made be brought afore hym the good horse of Reynawde Bayarde. And whan he saw him: he began for to saye in this wyse. Ha Bayarde, bayarde, thou hast often angred me, but I am come to ye poynt, god gramercy for to auenge me…. And whan the kyng had sayd so: he made a great milstone to be fastened at the necke of bayard, and than made him to be cast from the brydge downe into the water, & whan Bayarde was thus tombled into the ryuer…the kynge…made great Ioye and so said. Ha bayarde nowe haue I that I desyred and wysshed so lo[n]g For ye be now dead…. And whan the fre[n]che men sawe the greate cruelnes of Charlemayne that auenged himself upon a poore beast: they were yll co[n]tent. (Right plesaunt…historie, fol. 146v)
[Puis (Charlemagne) fist mander Baiart que Renau li fist rendre.
“Baiart, dist Charlemagnes, ta vigor m’(as) fait vandre
Maint jor m’as (fait corrout), maint povre, disner, prendre.”
................................................
Li rois fist Baiart penre iluecques maintenant.
Une mu(e)le li pent à son col par devant,
Et il fu sor le pont, si lo bota avant.
.............................
(Quant le voit Charlemaignes, si en ot joie grant.
“Baiart, ce dist li rois, or ai quanque demant.”)
.....................................
Quant François l’ont oï, si en ont mautalent.]
(15296–98, 303–5, 308–9, 12)
In the event the horse not only functions as “the pharmakos, the sacrificial victim immolated to ensure the others’ happiness” (Calin 95), but in the process he also throws into further relief the injustice of the oppression under which he and his master have suffered. Moreover, in representing his master for the purpose of punishment, Bayard also reaffirms his own heroic status as equivalent to that of Renaud: smashing the millstone that weighs him down, the horse escapes his tormentors to live out his life at ease in the forest of the Ardennes.
The Quatre fils Aymon proved highly popular in the late medieval and early modern periods, surviving in numerous manuscripts, translations, and adaptations.1 It spawned verse continuations in thirteenth-century Spain and fourteenth-century Italy and received mention in England in the early thirteenth century. However, the work's influence on later chivalric verse culminated with the Italian romances of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Luigi Pulci's Morgante (1483), for instance, revisits the exploits of Rinaldo and Baiardo, again remarking on the intimacy of the relationship between man and horse. Thus, for example, when Pulci's Rinaldo finds himself beset by a band of giants, Baiardo fights as furiously as he, prompting one of the giants to exclaim, “[G]o on your road, / for this your horse is better than a friend” [“piglia il tuo cammino, / ché questo tuo destriere è buon compagno” (16.103, 3–4)]. Taking his advice, Rinaldo finds rest in a shepherd's hut, but as soon as the knight falls asleep, his host steals Baiardo and conveys him to the nearest city, where he offers the horse for sale to the city hangman. Before committing to the purchase, the hangman asks for a display of riding, and predictable mayhem ensues:
[M]ost eager to comply, the shepherd spurred
Baiardo, who could feel who’d mounted him:
Quickly, therefore, into midair he leapt.
The shepherd, who knew not the art of riding,
fast found himself upon the barren ground
with two ribs broken.
[(Q)uel pastor di spron détte al cavallo.
Baiardo conosceva a chi egli é sotto:
Subitamente prese in aria un salto,
onde il pastor, ch’a l’arte non è dotto
so ritrovò di fatto in su lo smalto
e del petto due costole s’ha rotto.]
(16.108.8–16.109.5)
Here, as in the Quatre fils Aymon, Baiardo operates as a figure of calculated resistance who possesses the functional equivalent of human intelligence. In the Quatre fils he understands Renaud's conversation; in the Morgante he recognizes when an unfit rider climbs onto his back; in both cases he exhibits self-awareness and intellectual discrimination while casting his lot with his master and opposing his master's enemies. More than a well-trained animal in the modern understanding of the phrase, he emerges from these poems as a “buon compagno,” already possessing the distinctive personality he will retain in Ariosto as well. Moreover, these same qualities also characterize Rinaldo's horse in Ariosto's immediate precursor, the Orlando innamorato of Matteo Boiardo (1483). The key scene here unfolds when Baiardo, who has become separated from Ranaldo (Boiardo's spelling) and has passed through the hands of several caretakers in the process, finds himself bearing Orlando into combat, ironically, against Orlando's cousin and the horse's own true master, Ranaldo himself:
Valiant Orlando and Aymone's
strong son converged: both violent,
each thought he’d knock the other down.
Now listen to what's strange and new.
The good Baiardo recognized
its master when it saw Ranaldo.
…. …. …. ……
[A]nd that horse, as if he could think,
had no desire to go against
Ranaldo, so he swerved, despite
Orlando, to avoid the clash.
…. …. …. ……
At the same time, [Orlando] yanked the reins,
believing he would turn Baiardo,
but the horse moved no more or less
than if it stood to graze on grass.
[Il franco Orlando e il forte fio d’Amone
Se vanno addosso con tanto flagella,
Che profondar l’un l’altro ha opinione.
Ora ascoltare che strana novella:
Il bon Baiardo cognobbe di saldo,
Come fu gionto, il suo patron Ranaldo.
…. …. …. ……
E quel destrier, come avesse intelletto,
Contra Ranaldo non volse venire;
Ma voltasi a traverso a mal disperto
De Orlando, proprio al contro del ferire
................................
Ed a quel tempo ben ricolse il freno,
Credendolo a tal guisa rivoltare;
Non si muove Baiardo più di meno,
Come fosse nel prato a pascolare.
(1.26.26.2-8, 27.3-6, 30.1-4)
In sum, from his first appearance in the Quatre fils Aymon through his appropriations by the Italian romances of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the figure of Baiardo maintains a distinctive and steady character profile consonant with his intelligence and ability to engage in considered acts of disobedience. In the Quatre fils, Bayard already understands human language and successfully opposes the tyranny of Charlemagne; in Pulci, the horse serves as a “buon compagno” to Rinaldo, resisting his enemies in combat and refusing to obey when they seek to command him; in Boiardo, the horse behaves “come avesse intelletto,” refusing to engage in combat with his master; and in Ariosto, Baiardo expressly possesses “intelletto umano,” which he exercises in part by refusing to obey Rinaldo's enemies and in part by refusing to obey Rinaldo himself. Moreover, the various poets who develop Baiardo's character do so through consistent narrative gestures—topoi deployed after the manner of a Wagnerian leitmotif to serve, in effect, as the literary signature of the character in question. Baiardo's repeated human behavior—his “gesto umano”—provides a case in point, but perhaps the most distinctive such feature of the horse's presentation is what I would call the topos of equine civil disobedience: Baiardo's set-piece refusal to comply with commands or submit to conditions that he considers unjust or misguided. This refusal already appears in the Quatre fils, where, among other exploits, Bayard carries Charlemagne without his consent into Renaud's castle of Montaubon and then later escapes the emperor's persecution. However, the topos reaches its most distinctive form in Boiardo and Ariosto, in the horse's flat refusal to enter into combat against his master.
As I have argued above, this refusal—together with the broader qualities of character it presupposes—serves to ally Baiardo with Rinaldo, establishing a cross-species bond between the two companions that is grounded in their shared heroism and nobility and that serves to distinguish them from lesser human beings and lesser horses. However, this distinction does not prevent Baiardo from also serving as a symbolic referent for all horses everywhere. Indeed, the extreme popularity of the romances that deal with Baiardo, coupled with Baiardo's own status in those romances as the paragon of equine nobility, virtually assures that he will enter into late medieval popular culture as a synecdoche for horses in general. In England, for instance, the noun “bayard” becomes established in the mid-1300s as referring to “a bay horse”—in homage, the OED declares, to “the bright-bay-coloured magic steed given by Charlemagne to Renaud”; thereafter the term generalizes as “a kind of mock-heroic name for any horse” (s.v. “Bayard,” sb. 1, 2). Yet even in this downscale popularization, the character of Baiardo can assert itself in complex fashion across the species barrier. That, at least, is what it does in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380–88), where a humble namesake of Renaud's horse offers a figurative referent for Troilus's sudden and irresistible infatuation:
As proude Bayard gynneth for to skippe
Out of the weye, so pryketh him his corn,
Til he a lasshe have of the longe whippe—
Than thynketh he, “Though I praunce al byforn
First in the trays, ful fat and newe shorn,
Yet am I but an hors, and horses lawe
I moot endure, and with my feres drawe”—
So ferde it by this fierse and proude knyght.
(1.218–25)
Even as it marks boundaries and specifies limits, Chaucer's simile expands into an interspecies mise-en-abîme, tracing discriminations and affiliations in the same moment. For all his pride, Bayard discovers that a horse is a horse, that even the most exemplary specimen of the kind must endure “horses lawe” and draw in the traces with his companions, and yet this discovery is made possible by the unhorselike fact that Bayard—like his descendants in Boiardo and Ariosto—“thinketh.” His hard-won self-awareness thus traces a bond between horse and man, especially the love-captivated Troilus, with whom he shares both consciousness of his situation and an inability to escape its constraints. In this case, at least, the human-animal boundary seems especially significant for the differences it fails to mark.
On the other hand, Baiardo's literary legacy does seem to inspire at least one English writer to draw the boundary between species with a firmer hand. Ariosto's great early modern translator, Sir John Harington, appears determined to distance Rinaldo's horse from human capacities and human character; at any rate, Harington consistently downplays the moments in Ariosto's narrative that endow the horse with intelligence and agency. When, for instance, Baiardo greets Angelica in canto 1, Ariosto describes him as going “mansueto alla donzella, / con umile sembiante e gesto umano, / come intorno al padrone il can saltella, / che sia duo giorni o tre stato lontano” (1.75.1–4)—that is, approaching “the damsel gently, with humble appearance and human gesture, as a dog dances about its master when he has been absent for two or three days.” Harington's version of these lines suppresses the phrase “gesto umano,” leaving the horse much more firmly situated within a subordinate and separate order of creation:
But to the damsell gently he doth go
In humble manner and in lowly sort,
A spaniell after absence fauneth so
And seekes to make his master play and sport.
(1.75.1–4)
Likewise, when Ariosto excuses Baiardo's disobedience of Rinaldo by explicitly crediting the horse with human understanding, Harington lessens the force of the attribution. Ariosto's phrase “il destrier, ch’avea intelletto umano, / non per vizio seguirsi tante miglia” [“the horse, which had human intellect, did not follow such a course out of vice” (2.20.5–6)] reappears in the Elizabethan version as “The horse (that had of humane wit some tast) / Ran not away for anie jadish knacke” (2.20.5–6). And as if it were not enough to reduce “intelletto umano” to “some tast” of “humane wit,” the edition of 1591 supplies a wholly misleading marginal note at this point, likening Baiardo's mental abilities to those not of any human being but of another horse: “Bayardo is compared with Bucephalus for wit.” In fact, Ariosto draws no explicit comparison between Baiardo and Bucephalus, here or anywhere else in his vast romance, nor does Alexander's horse appear by name anywhere in the Orlando furioso. Even so, Harington goes out of his way at this particular moment to introduce the parallel. It seems to derive from Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights (c. 169), which offers the following description of Bucephalus's death in battle against the Rajah Porus:
It is…related that Alexander, in the war against India, mounted upon that horse and doing valorous deeds, had driven him, with disregard of his own safety, too far into the enemies’ ranks. The horse had suffered deep wounds in his neck and side from the weapons hurled from every hand at Alexander, but though dying and almost exhausted from loss of blood, he yet in swiftest course bore the king from the midst of the foe; but when he had taken him out of range of the weapons, the horse at once fell, and satisfied with having saved his master breathed his last, with indications of relief that were almost human.
[Id etiam de isto equo memoratum est, quod, cum insidens in eo Alexander bello Indico at facinora faciens fortia, in hostium cuneum non satis sibi providens inmisisset, coniectisque undique in Alexan-drum telis, vulneribus altis in cervice atque in latere equus perfossus esset, moribundus tamen ac prope iam exanguis e medies hostibus regem vivacissimo cursu retulit atque, ubi eum extra tela extulerat, ilico concidit et, domini iam superstitis securus, quasi cum sensus humani solacio animam expiravit. (5.2.4)]
It is a stirring picture of equine fidelity, and like Ariosto's depiction of Baiardo and Rinaldo, it speaks to a form of heroic companionship that transcends the species barrier. As Gellius remarks just prior to this anecdote, Bucephalus “would never allow himself to be mounted by any other than the king” [“haud umquam inscendi sese ab alio nisi ab rege passus sit” (5.2.3)]; under the circumstances, it seems right to speak of the horse as literally giving up the ghost [“animam expira(rens)”], for he and his master share a very particular spiritual bond. Likewise, in the conventional Aristotelian vocabulary of species differences, it appears reasonable to suppose that the “animam” Bucephalus surrenders is, in fact, something like the immaterial “anima rationalis” that supposedly distinguishes human from nonhuman animals.2 Yet even so, to credit Baiardo with “intelletto umano” seems a far more capacious claim than to endow Bucephalus “quasi cum sensus humani solacio” [literally, “with relief of an almost human character”], and at any rate Harington's marginal gloss reroutes Ariosto's original comparison of horse and human being into a comparison of horse and horse. By contrast, when Ariosto declares that Baiardo refuses, out of “instinto naturale,” to fight Rinaldo (2.6.5), Harington faithfully preserves this explanation: “The beast did know this much by natures force, / To hurt his maister were a service bad” (2.6.7–8).
The general purpose of these peculiar renderings becomes clearer if we consult the interpretive endnotes appended to each canto of Harington's 1591 translation. At the conclusion to canto 1 (and again after canto 2) the endnote on “Allegorie” fits Baiardo into an emblematic tradition stretching back to Plato whereby Rinaldo's mount, “a strong horse without rider or governour, is likened to the desire of man that runnes furiously after Angelica as it were after pleasure or honor or whatsoever man doth most inordinately affect” (1.Allegorie). Standing here for “mans fervent and furious appetite”—his “unbridled desire” (2.Allegorie)—Baiardo is in manifest need of rational—that is, human—governance, and Harington's local renderings of specific lines from Ariosto help to fit the verse, as it were, to this particular construction. In so inclining Ariosto's poem, Harington integrates it into a popular mode of Platonic allegoresis, grounded originally in the Phaedrus, to which I shall return soon. However, he does so at the cost of Baiardo's own claims to rational motivation, which have led other readers of Ariosto to view “the wise horse” as “a sly pun on ‘Boiardo,’ whom Ariosto is ‘following’ much as Rinaldo pursues his (apparently errant, actually purposeful) steed” (Ascoli 28n52). Harington's translation and glosses open up the former line of interpretation at the same time that they foreclose the latter, and apparently all because Harington was comfortable assigning instinctive motivation to Baiardo's behavior but drew the line (or tried to, at any rate) when it came to endowing the beast with a human mind.
Of course, drawing the line between species was not a concern for Harington alone in the early modern period. As Erica Fudge has observed, the conventional early modern discourse of species difference was riddled with conundrums, exceptions, contradictions, and downright absurdities—a set of “logical breakdowns” that “the reemergence of skepticism” in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly via the philosophy of Descartes, “offers…a way of thinking through” (Fudge, Brutal Reasoning 122). In this broad cultural context, the persistence of animal characters like Baiardo—endowed with the capacity for language, with self-awareness and awareness of others, with the ability to reason in the abstract, with personal and political agency, and with a privileged position in complex social networks that cut across the boundaries of species—emerges as one aspect of a much larger philosophical dilemma. Simply put, horses like Rinaldo's make it impossible to think of humanity as a distinct category with exclusive attributes. Baiardo's legacy puts the question, as it were, to humanism, suggesting on the intuitive level what Giorgio Agamben has asserted more directly: that “the humanist discovery of man is that he lacks himself, the discovery of his irremediable lack of dignitas” (30). Form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form.
It remains finally impossible to demonstrate beyond any doubt that Harington's decisions as a translator of Ariosto were driven by discomfort with the Italian poet's implicit challenge to human dignitas. Harington has left no express declaration on the subject, and his position on it can be inferred only from his interpretive practices. However, these practices all move in the same direction, all seeking, in their way, to reaffirm the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman animals. To this extent it seems reasonable to read Harington's translation as participating in broad cultural anxieties concerning the character of humanity, anxieties that were also coming to the fore in the philosophical discourse of Harington's contemporaries. Beyond Harington, moreover, other writers of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clearly found Baiardo's legacy ever more untenable and reacted to it in a variety of consistently negative ways. In England, Shakespeare and Milton provide the most prominent cases in point.
Chivalry's End
Among the available studies of Shakespeare's horses, the paradigm-setting work may be an essay on the first tetralogy produced some twenty-five years ago by Robert N. Watson.3 There, in typically meticulous fashion, Watson argues that “literal and figurative references to horsemanship serve to connect the failure of self-rule in such figures as Richard II, Hotspur, Falstaf , and the Dolphin with their exclusion from political rule,” while parallel references “connect Henry IV's and Henry V's self-mastery with their political mastery of England” (“Horsemanship” 274). For Watson, the equation of horsemanship with self-mastery and, by extension, with political authority finds its locus classicus in Plato's Phaedrus, with its metaphor of the human soul as a winged chariot ideally governed by the charioteer Reason.4 As Watson demonstrates, this text was widely dispersed in the early modern period, generating responses and adaptations in contemporary verse, iconography, and even riding manuals. The running allusions to horsemanship in Shakespeare's second tetralogy arguably participate in this pattern of metaphorical reference. More broadly, one could also argue that Shakespeare's equestrian references speak to the early modern English gentry's ongoing translation from a warrior class to a leisure class by associating horsemanship with the “defunct ideology” of chivalry (Ralph Berry 105).5
Without doubt, Plato's metaphorical association of self-mastery with horsemanship has left its mark on Shakespeare's work, as it has done on early modern culture more broadly. Albert Ascoli, for one, has also traced its influence on the equestrian symbolism of Orlando furioso (382–83), and as we have seen, Sir John Harington was pleased to detect its influence there as well, some centuries before Ascoli. However, Plato's metaphor offers little scope for the exercise of animal agency, which it understands only as a set of appetitive impulses in need of rational governance. As a result, this metaphor remains in certain ways hostile to the equine characters of chivalric romance, horses like Baiardo and Bucephalus who provide their masters not just with unquestioning obedience but with something closer to considered and selective collaboration. For Shakespeare, at least, that may well be the point. The poet's work unfolds in a universe broadly uncongenial to the sentient animals of the romance tradition, a universe in which the actual beasts that now and then wander onto the Shakespearean stage—most notably Crab in Two Gentlemen of Verona—function as nontheatrical singularities, excluded from the logic of mimesis and the social interaction it enables. By the same token, Shakespeare's figurative references to beasts are riddled with the anxiety that accompanies composite forms: Caliban the fish-man, Shylock the cur-man, Bottom the ass-man, Othello and Desdemona making the beast with two backs. All of this taken in aggregate suggests a Shakespearean sensibility with little sympathy for the chivalric ethos or for the peculiar relationship between human and nonhuman nature that it presupposes.
This is not to say, however, that Shakespeare ignores the world of chivalry: on the contrary, he gestures toward it through a variety of equestrian references that participate in the romance tradition and that resist the binary of dominance and servitude deriving from Plato's Phaedrus. Take, for instance, Henry V's Dolphin. An anti-Gallic caricature redolent with aristocratic snobbery, he lavishes extravagant praise on his horse, describing it in ways that echo the Ariostan idiom: “I will not change my horse with any that treads but on four [pasterns]. Ça, ha! He bounds from the earth, as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk; he trots the air…. It is a beast for Perseus. He is pure air and fire, and the dull elements of earth and water never appear in him…. He is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts” (3.7.11–24). With his allusion to Pegasus, the Dolphin places his horse within a mythic lineage that extends through Orlando furioso's hippogriff , “un gran destriero alato” (4.4.7), trained by the enchanter Atlante to convey his ward Ruggiero to the far ends of the earth, while also encompassing Baiardo, who in Ariosto's sixteenth canto flies toward the pagan besiegers of Paris as if he had wings [“il destrier volta / tanto leggier, che fa sembrar ch’abbia ale” (16.49.1–2)]. The associations here are, of course, literary and figurative, rather than biological and literal, but the Dolphin uses them to insist that a difference of degree (his horse is better than other horses) is, in fact, a difference of kind: “He is indeed a horse, and all other jades you may call beasts.” It is a familiar rhetorical gesture, participating in the chivalric ethos that conceives distinctions of rank to be irreducible, unalterable, and fundamental determinants of identity.
Of course, to say “My horse is not a beast as other horses are” comes very close to saying “My horse is more like to me than to other horses,” which in turn raises the possibility of saying “My horse is more like to me than are other men.” This is the extreme implication of the chivalric premise that differences of degree can confound those of species, and the Dolphin wastes no time in hastening toward it: “It [the Dolphin's horse] is the prince of palfreys: his neigh is like the bidding of a monarch, and his countenance enforces homage…. ‘This a subject for a sovereign to reason on, and for a sovereign's sovereign to ride on; and for the world, familiar to us and unknown, to lay apart their particular functions and wonder at him. I once writ a sonnet in his praise and began thus: ‘Wonder of nature’—(3.7.27–40). The Dolphin's kinsman, the Duke of Orleance, listens to this blather with increasing annoyance. When the Dolphin likens his horse's whinnying to human speech (and worse than that, to royal speech), further suggesting that the animal's “countenance enforces homage” (that is, that a mere look at the beast should compel inferior beings to revere him), Orleance calls time: “No more, cousin” (3.7.30). And when the Dolphin, not to be discouraged by lesser mortals, segues into poetic effusions, Orleance responds with deflating humor: “I have heard a sonnet begin so to one's mistress” (3.7.40–41).
From here the scene devolves into a series of off-color jokes based on confusion of the species barrier: for instance, “Your mistress bears well” (3.7.45; this from Orleance to the Dolphin) or “I tell thee, Constable, my mistress wears his own hair” (3.7.60–61; this from the Dolphin to the Constable of France, who has entered the fray in support of Orleance). One could dismiss such stuff as coarse fare for the groundlings, but it arises out of tensions created by a specifically aristocratic discourse: that is, by the Dolphin's efforts to present himself and his mount in heroic terms derived from the chivalric romance tradition. It makes particular sense that Orleance, of all characters, should find this self-presentation most irritating; after all, a human member of the royal family has most to lose from the proposition that animals, too, can be human and royal. Responding with erotic innuendo, he invokes the language of sexism to reaffirm the logic of speciesism.
As it happens, this gesture—whereby difference of gender is conceived in terms of difference of species, and vice versa—occurs so often in Shakespeare as to comprise a signature motif of sorts. Moreover, it assumes its definitive form in the equation of women to horses. To Petruchio, Katharina becomes “My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything” (Taming of the Shrew 3.2.232). Puck promises the sleeping Lysander that “Jack shall have Jill; /…/ The man shall have his mare again” (Midsummer Night's Dream 3.2.461–63). Hotspur assures his wife that “when I am a’ horseback, I will swear / I love thee infinitely” (1 Henry IV 2.3.101–2). Cleopatra wishes she could be a horse so as “to bear the weight of Antony” (1.5.21). Antigonus responds to the possibility of an unchaste Hermione by exclaiming, “I’ll keep my stables where / I lodge my wife” (The Winter's Tale 3.1.134–35). Such moments may derive in part from the obvious sexual suggestiveness of the horse-and-rider configuration, in part from the shared dynamics of dominance and submission that traverse both gender and species relations, in part from the traditional status of both women and horses as property within the legal patrimonium of a Roman paterfamilias.6 However, beyond all these considerations, the conflation of women with horses provides Shakespeare with a powerful antichivalric image, an antidote to the heroic dyad of Rinaldo and Baiardo, hero and steed. This is why Orleance invokes it to counter the Dolphin's grandiose claims for the preeminence of his horse. This is arguably also why Shakespeare contrasts the pretentious nonsense of Henry V's horsey Frenchmen with a hardscrabble vision of the English cavalry at Agincourt:
The [English] horsemen sit like fixed candlesticks,
With torch-staves in their hand; and their poor jades
Lob down their heads, dropping the hides and hips,
The gum down-roping from their pale-dead eyes,
And in their pale dull mouths the [gimmal’d] bit
Lies foul with chaw’d-grass, still and motionless.
(4.2.45–50)
In this context, Henry's victory marks not only the triumph of England over France and yeomanly virtues over aristocratic preciosity; it also entails the conquest of one literary idiom by another and a transition between the models of nature these literary idioms presuppose. The possibility of Baiardo—to put it more broadly, the possibility of animal character and perhaps even that of a sentient nature in general—emerges as one casualty of this transition.
In the Dolphin's case, anti-Gallic prejudice combines with a selective sort of antiaristocratic contempt to produce a mockery of the chivalric tradition. However, when not inflected by nationalism and racial prejudice, Shakespeare's equestrian depictions of aristocratic privilege can take widely varied forms, ranging in quality from regal triumphalism to tragic ambivalence. Even Richard II, perhaps the most famously flawed royal horseman in the Shakespeare canon, emerges from his play less as an effete ninny than as an object of pathos and a source of national guilt. This differences in tone derives in large part from Richard's intensely voiced sense of sympathetic connection to his kingdom, a connection he figures repeatedly as a kind of communion with the fabric of nature. His “senseless conjuration” (3.2.23) at Barkloughly Castle provides a classic, if typically extreme, example:
Dear earth, I do salute thee with my hand,
Though rebels wound thee with their horses’ hoofs
…. …. …. …. …. …. ……
Feed not thy sovereign's foe, my gentle earth,
Nor with thy sweets comfort his ravenous sense,
But let thy spiders, that suck up thy venom,
And heavy-gaited toads lie in their way,
Doing annoyance to the treacherous feet,
Which with usurping steps do trample thee.
Yield stinging nettles to mine enemies;
And when they from thy bosom pluck a flower,
Guard it, I pray thee, with a lurking adder.
(3.2.6–20)
As Gabriel Egan has observed, “Throughout the drama of Shakespeare, characters speak of the world around them as though it is alive” (22), and Richard's speech provides an exemplary instance of this habit. Its logic derives from the Piconian assumption that “God has sown and planted” throughout the fabric of nature a “harmony of the universe which the Greeks with greater aptness of terms called sumpatheia” (Pico 57). On Richard's view, the same divine will that ordained the natural order also ordained his own privileged position within that order. Thus any act of rebellion against Richard is equivalent to rebellion against nature itself, and the way is cleared, in Richard's imagination, for spiders, toads, and adders to fight on his behalf. Putting the same idea more directly to Bullingbrook and his allies, Richard elsewhere frames it in epidemiological terms:
[T]hough you think that all, as you have done,
Have torn their souls by turning them from us,
And we are barren and bereft of friends,
Yet know my master, God omnipotent,
Is mustering in his clouds on our behalf
Armies of pestilence, and they shall strike
Your children yet unborn and unbegot.
(3.3.82–88)
Elsewhere still Richard urges the very same notion via an astronomical analogy:
[W]hen this thief, this traitor Bullingbrook
Who all this while hath revell’d in the night,
Whilst we were wandering with the antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day.
(3.2.47–52)
Nonhuman animals, plagues, heavenly bodies—Richard imagines himself as intimately aligned with all of these by virtue of their common status as expressions of the divine purpose. Within this context his own royal nature emerges as an object of revelation rather than attainment: something to be displayed and admired, not maintained and contested.
It should be immediately evident that the chivalric bond between horse and master with which this chapter is concerned—what I have called Baiardo's legacy—relates to Richard's general self-presentation as does species to genus. If, that is, the king's preeminence is written into the fabric of nature, it should be recognizable not just by toads and adders but by more exalted beasts as well, and chivalric equestrian culture lends special importance to the horse as a case in point. That is why the Alexander romances insist that Bucephalus would admit only one rider;7 in a universe imbued with divine harmony, the prince of horses instinctively recognizes the prince of men and submits to him and him alone. Likewise, Baiardo's refusal—in both Ariosto and Boiardo—to do battle with his master speaks to the same model of sympathetic nature; the extraordinary horse, understanding himself as such, recognizes his counterpart in the extraordinary man and obeys no other. In a sense, Shakespeare's Richard II can be understood as an extreme embodiment of this model of the universe: a dramatic figure whose governing principle is the law of universal harmony, a character created to take this law seriously and tease out its implications for all to see.
Understood in this way, Richard opens his play by enacting a problem intrinsic to his mode of self-apprehension: if the king stands preeminent within the order of nature, to what extent may he preempt that order? Has the divine will fashioned royal privilege as a principle of self-negation empowered to suspend, supersede, reconfigure, or simply ignore its other manifestations? Richard's own view of the question is made clear by his conduct of the dispute between Mowbray and Bullingbrook with which his play begins. “We were not born to sue, but to command” (1.1.196), he tells the quarreling peers and then prepares to adjudicate their differences via the definitive ritual of courtly romance, the trial by joust:
Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,
At Coventry upon Saint Lambert's day.
There shall your swords and lances arbitrate
The swelling differences of your settled hate.
Since we cannot atone you, we shall see
Justice design the victor's chivalry.
(1.1.198–203)
Of course, this is not how things turn out. Instead, Richard aborts the trial by combat, replaces it with royal fiat, and thus fashions himself into the first and most ominous antichivalric principle in his own play:
Let them lay by their helmets and their spears,
And both return back to their chairs again.
withdraw with us, and let the trumpets sound
While we return these dukes what we decree.
(1.3.119-22)
One may argue endlessly (and, in my opinion, pointlessly) whether Richard's behavior justifies Bullingbrook's rebellion; to my mind, Richard II concerns itself less with what should be than with what is. To this extent, the opening disruption of chivalric ritual sets the tone for everything that follows, placing the play's events in a world at odds with the logic and gestures of courtly romance. In this world even the most vocal advocate of the chivalric ethos, Richard himself, lacks the courage of his convictions. Unwilling to rely on trial by combat as an instrument of divine justice, he replaces it with royal decree. At Barkloughly Castle his extreme assertions of divine right prove so patently out of step with circumstances that he feels obliged to defend them, both to his companions and to himself:
Mock not my senseless conjuration, lords,
This earth shall have a feeling, and these stones
Prove armed soldiers, ere her native king
Shall falter under foul rebellion's arms.
(3.2.23-26)
Of course, the defense is vain, even when taken on its own terms. Richard's hopeful expectation that “[t]his earth shall have a feeling” in itself admits the contrary: that egan's notion of a living, feeling world exists in this play, even for Richard, only as a function of the hypothetical subjunctive. Richard does falter, the stones do not rise up, and the chivalric ideal of a monarch at one with his environment yields to the image of a resistant natural world, figured through a flawed relationship between horse and rider:
Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaëton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
(3.3.178-79)
Critics have long read these lines as a glance at “Richard's failures of self-rule,” which “have already deposed him from the solar chariot” (Watson, “Horsemanship” 284). However, at its heart, the tale of Phaethon is one of disharmony between man and nature: not just the ecological catastrophe of a sun-scorched earth but the more intimate strife between horse and rider locked in a fruitless contest of wills. As such, it marks the opposite of the Rinaldo-Baiardo dyad, horse and man in a harmony beyond dominance and submission.
If Richard II opens by invoking yet disabling the conventional expectations and topoi of chivalric romance, it ends in the same way. Indeed, Richard's final conversation is focused on the failure of the horse-rider relationship as exemplified in Boiardo and Ariosto by what I have called the topos of equine civil disobedience. Shakespeare conjures up a nameless groom of Richard's stable to visit the deposed king and condole with him over his straitened circumstances, and perhaps inevitably, both Richard and his former groom turn to horsemanship for a vocabulary with which to describe what has gone wrong:
Groom. O how it ern’d my heart when I beheld In London streets, that coronation-day, When Bullingbrook rode on roan Barbary, That horse that thou so often hast bestrid, That horse that I so carefully have dress’d!
K. Richard. Rode he on Barbary? Tell me, gentle friend, How went he under him?
Groom. So proudly as if he disdain’d the ground.
K. Richard. So proud that Bullingbrook was on his back! That jade hath eat bread from my royal hand, This hand hath made him proud with clapping him. Would he not stumble? Would he not fall down, Since pride must have a fall, and break the neck Of that proud man that did usurp his back?
(5.5.76–89)
For Richard, the horse's behavior embodies a broader failure of relationship: a fracture of the bonds of gratitude and obedience that unite culture to nature and both to God. Thus the sin of pride binds Barbary and Bullingbrook together in Richard's imagination, and thus too Richard expresses particular surprise to find this sin disfiguring the singularly personal relationship he has shared with his horse. Barbary's willingness to bear Bullingbrook—his failure to refuse, in the manner of Baiardo, to turn against his true master—marks what one can only call a lapse of personal integrity. Indeed, if one views personal integrity as a function of personality in the modern, Cartesian sense of the term—that is, of personal agency grounded in introspective self-awareness—one must view the horse's lapse more broadly as the breakdown of a whole discourse of equine character, elaborated by the fabulous events of romance and subtended by the ethics of feudalism. When Richard finally absolves the horse of blame, he does so by depriving all horses, everywhere, of the capacity for personhood in this sense:
Forgiveness, horse! Why do I rail on thee,
Since thou, created to be aw’d by man,
Wast born to bear? I was not made a horse,
And yet I bear a burthen like an ass,
Spurr’d, gall’d, and tir’d by jauncing Bullingbrook.
(5.5.90–94)
Richard emerges from his play as one of Shakespeare's incredible shrinking men—a figure, like Antony, whose identity melts away inexorably over the course of five acts. If, at the end, this progressive loss of royal character is tied to the loss of animal character as well, it is because both of these exist in a world that has been revealed as a figment of Richard's imagination, a world governed by a divinely instituted system of degree and sustained by a universal harmony in the fabric of nonhuman nature.
Richard II derives its conflicted, mournful tone from this fact: not simply an enactment of the death of a great man or even of the untimely end of a monarchy and a dynasty, the play performs the loss of an entire world and the language that conjured it into being. It is interesting that Shakespeare are returns to this world at the end of his career, in his collaborative work with John Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen (c. 1613). Less openly political than Richard II, this late play situates itself more directly in the tradition of chivalric romance, drawing as it does on Chaucer's Knight's Tale for its main story line. The attribution of authorship in specific scenes remains uncertain, and to this extent it also remains tricky to fix upon specific passages as representative of one author's habits of thought or literary development. However, a broad if tentative scholarly consensus on the authorship question has developed, with general opinion crediting Shakespeare with most of acts 1 and 5, and Fletcher with most of acts 2–4.8 While this broad hypothesis remains unconfirmed, it also seems reasonable to assume that the collaborating playwrights engaged in some fairly close coordination of plot lines and thematic issues. With these considerations in mind, we may read the play as a kind of farewell to romance that, especially in its final act, repudiates the practices of equine characterization typical of the romance tradition.
This repudiation occurs concurrently within the play's heroic main plot—which recounts the tragic sexual rivalry of the knights Palamon and Arcite—and in its comic subplot—which centers on the Athenian Jailer's Daughter's unrequited passion for her prisoner, Palamon, who enters her care after being taken captive in battle by Duke Theseus. In both plots the play reenacts chivalric conventions but in a queasy, discomforting, and in some cases openly parodic way, perhaps thus augmenting the gentler ironic distance imposed on the same subject matter by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The play's main plot centers at first on heroic friendship, the sort of loyalty foregrounded in much chivalric literature as, for instance, in cantos 18 and 19 of the Furioso. There the pagan warrior Medoro risks his life to retrieve the body of his slain lord Dardinello from a heavily guarded battlefield held by Charlemagne's army and is accompanied in the effort by his comrade Cloridano, who sacrifices his life to help Medoro escape with Dardinello's corpse. At the outset of Shakespeare and Fletcher's play, Palamon and Arcite depict their friendship in similarly extravagant terms: “dearer in love than blood” (1.2.1), the cousins claim that in war, “the blood we venture / Should be as for our health” (1.2.109–10); taken captive together, they imagine themselves as “one another's wife, ever begetting / New births of love” (2.2.80–81). Likewise, the play's comic subplot opens with a sudden infatuation that is similarly reminiscent of romance. Just as, in the Furioso, Angelica stumbles upon the wounded Medoro after his rescue of Dardinello's body and falls instantly in love with him, so the Jailer's Daughter exclaims of Palamon, “I love him beyond love and beyond reason, / Or wit, or safety” (2.6.11–12). However, in both plots of the play, the conventional romance pose malfunctions. Within a hundred lines of being “one another's wife,” Palamon and Arcite have repudiated their friendship in the name of sexual rivalry: as Palamon declares, “Thou art a traitor, Arcite…/…Friendship, blood, / And all the ties between us, I disclaim” (2.2.171–73). Likewise, the Jailer's Daughter experiences a passion far less noble and enduring than its chivalric counterparts. Overlooked by an Emilia-besotted Palamon, she lapses into madness, but even this stance of heroic ardor dissolves in turn into self-parody when she is persuaded to accept an impersonator in Palamon's place.
As for Palamon and Arcite's courtship of Emilia, this too proceeds with the conventional trappings of chivalry, only to repudiate these, as it were, after the fact. Horses inevitably figure as part of the business. When first introduced to Emilia, for instance, Arcite declares, “I dare not praise / My feat in horsemanship, yet they that knew me / Would say it was my best piece” (2.5.12–14). Pirithous responds by promising, “because you say / You are a horseman, I must needs intreat you / This afternoon to ride” (2.3.45–46). As Arcite gains marks of favor from Emilia, his good fortune develops in equine terms:
She takes strong note of me,
Hath made me near her; and this beauteous morn
(The prim'st of all the year) presents me with
A brace of horses; two such steeds might well
Be by a pair of kings back’d, in a field
That their crowns’ titles tried.
(3.1.17–22)
Although Palamon and Arcite agree, prior to their first combat for Emilia, that they will “use no horses” (3.6.59), this decision is clearly made for practical theatrical purposes, so that the fight may be presented onstage, and Arcite at once recalls a previous battle in which Palamon “charg’d / Upon the left wing of the enemy, / I spurr’d hard to come up, and under me / I had a right good horse” (3.6.74–77). Likewise after their final duel, when Arcite has won and Palamon has lost, Theseus praises the latter in terms of his horsemanship: “He [Arcite] speaks now of as brave a knight as e’er / Did spur a noble steed” (5.3.115–16). The markers of sexual favor, heroism, and literary genre converge repeatedly on this form of cross-species troping.
That being the case, it comes as a particular irony that Arcite should meet his end in a riding accident—indeed, an accident that involves one of the horses Emilia presented to him as a mark of her favor. The passage describing this misfortune, a speech generally assigned to Shakespeare's authorship, comprises the play's greatest histrionic set piece:
[Arcite,]
Mounted upon a steed that Emily
Did first bestow on him—a black one, owing
Not a hair-worth of white, which some will say
Weakens his price, and many will not buy
His goodness with that note; which superstition
Here finds allowance—on this horse is Arcite
Trotting the stones of Athens….
…. …. …. …. …. …. …. .
…As he thus went counting
The flinty pavement, dancing as ‘twere to th’ music
His own hoofs made (for as they say from iron
Came music's origin), what envious flint,
Cold as old Saturn, and like him possess’d
With fire malevolent, darted a spark,
Or what fierce sulphur else, to this end made,
I comment not—the hot horse, hot as fire,
Took toy at this, and fell to what disorder
His power could give his will, bounds, comes on end,
Forgets school-doing, being therein train’d,
And of kind manage; pig-like he whines
At the sharp rowel, which he frets at rather
Than any jot obeys; seeks all foul means
Of boist’rous and rough jad’ry to disseat
His lord that kept it bravely. When nought serv’d,
When neither curb would crack, girth break, nor diff‘ring plunges
Disroot his rider whence he grew, but that
He kept him ‘tween his legs, on his hind hoofs
[…] on end he stands,
That Arcite's legs, being higher than his head,
Seem’d with strange art to hang. His victor's wreath
Even then fell off his head; and presently
Backward the jade comes o’er, and his full poise
Becomes the rider's load. Yet is he living,
Yet such a vessel ‘tis that floats but for
The surge that next approaches.
(5.4.49-84)
As a virtuoso rhetorical performance, this speech proves almost impossible to abbreviate; its intricate syntax, like the tortuous action it describes, defies efforts at restraint or productive curtailment. At heart it rehearses a mundus inversus motif, a scene of catastrophic reversal that occurs not only on the level of plot—as Arcite's fortunes alter in a heartbeat—but on the level of personal status as well. Indeed, the horse's wild cavortings provide a spatial counterpart to the implied logic of degree that saturates the speech. Prancing on his hind legs so that Arcite's head hangs upside-down and his victor's wreath falls to the earth, the mount embodies a similar inversion. First introduced in act 3 as one of “A brace of horses [which] might well / Be by a pair of kings back’d” (3.1.20–21), the horse here “whines” in “pig-like” manner as he disobeys his master, his regression down the great chain of being providing both an occasion and a parallel for Arcite's similar dislocation. The whole set of reversals is introduced as an issue of character: the horse's black coat supposedly advertises his unreliability, so that “many will not buy / His goodness with this note” (5.4.52–53). And the character problem extends to Arcite as well insofar as the “brace of horses” Emilia has given him recalls the paired steeds of Plato's Phaedrus: allowing his passion for Emilia to ruin his friendship with Palamon, Arcite has arguably surrendered his reason to appetite, and thus he rightly meets his end in an accident involving an unruly horse—apparently the bad one of a pair.
